Maximising profitability for your business. It makes good business sense to manage the design on your projects to maximise the return for your business.

Enhancing your organisation’s reputation. Securing the next job is very important for any business or organisation to survive. Delivering the project you have in hand by meeting or exceeding the expectations of different parties involved not only enhances your organisation’s reputation it provides the basis for getting repeat or ongoing work.

The key message here: managing design well is good for business. However, to manage design properly you need to have a structured and effective design management process in your organisation or business.

The first step of any design management process (DMP) implementation for an organisation or business is to develop the DMP Implementation Strategy. This implementation strategy will cover the following:

DMP strategy and recommendations

DMP uses

Enabling DMP processes

DMP information and data

DMP infrastructure

DMP and people

DMP education and training

The strategic planning for DMP implementation will direct the nominated DMP planning team through three steps to develop a detailed DMP Implementation Strategy. These are:

Conduct a current organisational assessment of current design management processes;

Establish a desired level of implementation of design management processes; and

Design management process uses

The internal application of DMP is called a DMP use. A DMP use is defined as a method or strategy of applying design management processes during the project lifecycle to achieve one or more specific objectives.

The typical methodology for the development of the DMP implementation involves a series of meetings and workshops with the appropriate client management team and the designated client DMP implementation team.

Following the gathering of all possible information, the first step is to undertake the compilation, preparation and finalisation of a high level executive DMP Implementation Strategy Report.

After reviewing and approving the executive DMP Implementation Strategy Report, and subject to the recommendations in the report, the client’s DMP Implementation team will take forward the implementation of the recommended design management processes and uses.

Paul Sancandi

Paul Sancandi is a senior design manager with InfraSol Group. He has a technical background as a structural engineer, owned an architectural and engineering practice and has worked in Australia, Asia and the Middle East on a wide range of small to mega projects over the past 32 years.

One thought on “The strategy behind project design management”

One of the issues with implementing a design management system is that the architectural profession, obsessed as it often seems to be with building ‘walk-in sculpture’ photo opportunities, is that it doesn’t really have a usable theory of design: not an art-derived theory, but a theory as to how requirements are orchestrated parsimoniously into a built form. There is no theory, afaik, on which to hang Corbusier’s dicturm that an architect is an organiser, not a drawing board artist.